Will WebBrowser controls added in WPF C# applications continue to work after IE is retired and what about HTA applications?

Question

We have a couple desktop apps the incorporate IE controls. Will WPF web browsers continue to work once IE is retired and what support will exist for HTA apps? I imagine clients using the desktop solutions will need IE installed locally on their machine after IE is retired. Assuming that is the case, will IE be completely retired (no longer available for download) or just moved into mature support?

Answer 1

From Nic Champagne Williamson [MSFT], who works on MS Edge :

"
the WebBrowser control will continue to work after the IE Desktop Browser end of life in 2022, until about 2029.
We do have #440 tracking adding IE mode support,
but I don't anticipate we will get to that work anytime soon,
and our recommendation is to switch between using WebView2 and WebBrowser if you still need IE support.
"

Answer 2

Apps that rely on the browser control will continue working after IE is retired. What is being retired is IE the app, not the underlying HTML engine that IE wraps. They are 2 different things.

Apps can continue to use the "legacy" WebBrowser control but it has been recommended for a while that you upgrade to the WebView control for WPF and ideally the WebView2 control if it has all the features you need. This is partially discussed here.

Answer 3

HTA are hosted by MSHTA.exe app which uses the mshtml libraries, so it works without IE.

Whether future windows releases include the app is a different question. As MSHTA requires IE only markup, it unlikely to ever get updated to support the current web view.

you should probably plan on migrating off of HTAs. maybe progressive apps would work. Blazor Hybrid is probably the closest replacement for HTA.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/hybrid/?view=aspnetcore-6.0